Taking the SAT May 4

The May 4th SAT is almost here!  I will be taking it for the first time since May 2016 and this time at a large public high school in the Bronx.   There have been 8 officially released exams of which 1-4 predate the administration of the new SAT.  SAT 5 is the May 2016 test and tests 6 -8 are 2016 and 2017 exams. 
In addition to the 8 practice tests in the Official SAT book or online, there is Khan Academy for prep.  Here is a newer exam out on the web:  April 2018 SAT.  

NCAA Hoop and Math

Even though it's April -- March Madness is still here.  This year, the hoop tournament was framed in terms of Math as reports detailed the probability/odds of picking all 63 winners for each of the games.  This link from the NCAA outlines the details of the numbers: showing 1 in about 9.2 quintillion ( 9,223,372,036,854,775,808) or about one billion billions (not a typo!).

The number of possible outcomes is more than the number of grains of sand on the Earth!  It also explains that the average winner gets almost 50 out of the 63 right.  To put this in perspective the NCAA shared th at in their 2018 Bracket Challenge Game, "even with 94.4 percent of millions of brackets being unique, we only covered 0.0000000000182 percent of all possible bracket permutations!"
Smithsonian magazine "The Math Madness Behind a Perfect NCAA Bracket"

 Uncertain Times Call for Certain Math

This TED talk by Masha Gershman (the daughter of the Russian School of Mathematics founder) details the core belief that a child's potential is not preset and that Math is the best tool for mental empowerment.